Velocity DEX CEO Cindy Leow steps down after relaunch

Cindy Leow, the co-founder who built what was once Drift Protocol from scratch on Solana, is walking away from Velocity DEX effective September 29, 2026. Her departure comes just weeks after the platform completed a full public relaunch following one of the most devastating exploits in DeFi history. The timing is deliberate. Leow spent the last six months rebuilding a platform that lost more than $280 million in an April 1 security breach linked to the Lazarus-affiliated group UNC6862. Now that the reconstruction is done, she’s handing the keys to a leadership team tasked with a fundamentally different job: scaling. From $150B in volume to ground zero Before everything went sideways, Velocity DEX (then Drift Protocol) had quietly become one of the more successful perpetual futures exchanges in decentralized finance. The platform racked up more than $150 billion in cumulative trading volume since its November 2021 launch on Solana. Then came April 1, 2026. The exploit drained over $280 million from the protocol, forcing the entire platform offline. What followed was an extended period of triage. The team brought in OtterSec for security audits, rotated all keys, redesigned the commu...